PERSONAL GROWTH

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Challenged by Holiday Time Spent with Family? Explore My Build-Your-Own Holiday Coping Kit.

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • November 15, 2015

I’m imagining that for you – like me – these last few days may have been particularly emotionally challenging.

From the huge emotional impact of devastating world events like the attacks on Paris and Beirut to the unique strains and stressors that may be taking place within your own life, you may feel yourself particularly strained, challenged, and overwhelmed now as the days darken and winter arrives.

And to top it all off, it’s now officially holiday season.

Admittedly, for some, this can be “the most wonderful time of the year.” (And if that’s the case for you – awesome! Enjoy every minute of it.)

But for many of us, not even accounting for the impact of global catastrophes, the next six weeks can be one of the most triggering, challenging, emotional, and exhausting times of the entire year. Especially – let me repeat, especially! – if we plan on spending any portion of it with our families.

Because, let’s face it, not all of us grew up with or married into sane, healthy, functional, supportive families.

The holidays are a time of the year when, if we spend it with our families, many of us might experience ancient frustrations, young feelings, a slip backwards into unhealthy communication patterns and coping habits, and just generally wonder where that otherwise functional, healthy adult version of us has disappeared to.

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert summed it up neatly when she said:

“I had a great teacher in India who said to me, ‘If you think you’re spiritual and evolved and enlightened, go home for Christmas and see how it goes.”

Yep.

If spending the holidays with family feels hard for you, you’re not alone. If it feels like all your well-earned insights about yourself and the creative coping mechanisms you’ve developed over the last year in therapy or the School of Life dissolve in the face of your holiday family dynamics, that makes sense, and it’s okay. It’s a very hard time of the year for many of us.

And because this time of year can be hard for so many, in today’s blog post I want to help you craft and create a Build-Your-Own Holiday Coping Kit to help you prepare and plan for self-care over the holidays (or really, for any time that the events of life feel like too much).

So pour yourself a cup of tea and keep reading…

Build-Your-Own Holiday Coping Kit.

As you probably know, when tough times hit, you may get triggered, flooded, or just generally thrown off balance. When you go home for the holidays with your family, the stability, grounding, comfort, and confidence you may feel in your day-to-day may be challenged. Greatly challenged. So in order to support yourself in navigating those challenges, you can plan and prepare in advance by:

1. Acknowledge and expect that you may get challenged;
2. Get curious about how and why you get challenged;
3. Get curious about how you usually respond to being challenged around your family;
4. Get creative and actionable about how you cope and self-soothe when you’re challenged, and
5. Put it all together so you have a list of insights and supports that you can turn to if things get tough over the holidays with your family.

These five steps form the basis of your Build-Your-Own Holiday Coping Kit. So now, as we dive into exploring each of these steps, I invite you to crack open your journal or load up a new Google Doc and write down your answers to each of the inquiries and exercises I’m about to walk you through. If you do this, you’ll walk away with a customized Build-Your-Own Holiday Coping Kit that you can use during these next six weeks to help support your self-care.

The Neurobiology of Holiday Triggers: Why Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does

One of the most disorienting aspects of the holiday season — especially for driven women who have worked hard to build adult lives quite different from their families of origin — is that the nervous system doesn’t care how much you’ve grown. It runs its own calendar.

This is because of how the brain encodes early experience. Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, describes how traumatic or dysregulating experiences get encoded not just as memories but as bodily states — physiological templates that can be reactivated by sensory cues: a smell, a song, a flight home, the particular quality of light in December. Long before you’ve consciously registered that you’re about to enter a difficult family environment, your nervous system has already activated.

What this means practically is that holiday reactivity is often not about the specific thing that happens at the table — the comment your mother makes, the dynamic that resurfaces with your sibling. It’s the activation of an older state, a younger version of you who has suddenly been reawakened by the sensory environment of home. The work of preparing for the holidays, therefore, isn’t just logistical. It’s nervous system preparation: building the capacity to remain resourced and present even when older states are pulling you back.

Mei is a 37-year-old attorney who spends the weeks before Thanksgiving in what she describes as “low-grade dread.” Her family gatherings are not violent. Nobody is openly cruel. But the particular energy of her parents’ house — her mother’s anxiety, her father’s emotional unavailability, the unspoken rules about who is allowed to have needs and who isn’t — activates her in ways that take weeks to metabolize. “I can negotiate a complex contract without breaking a sweat,” she told me. “But I walk into my parents’ house and I’m twelve years old again.” That’s neuroception doing exactly what it was designed to do.

Understanding this doesn’t make the holidays easy. But it does make them less confusing, and a little less shameful. You’re not failing to handle things well. You’re navigating a nervous system that learned to be vigilant in an environment that required it.

Step One: Recognize and Understand (as best you can) Your Triggers.

List out five examples of the people, places, situations, and content that have historically triggered you. (example: conversations about religion, getting stuck having to clean up Christmas dinner by yourself while your siblings go out for a drink, etc.)

List out five examples of how you usually respond when you’re feeling triggered. What thoughts and urges and feelings typically come up for you? (example: I feel the urge to flee, to run away, to hop on a plane and GO — I feel panicked and trapped.)

List out five examples of what has helped you in the past when you’re feeling triggered? List a few examples of what hasn’t helped. (example: Calling my best girlfriend has helped. Trying to get my Uncle to see how he hurt my feelings has not helped – that was a losing battle. Eating a whole tin of fudge didn’t actually help in the long run.)

Step Two: Work on What You Can.

List out five examples of how you can structure time with your family so as to not feel so triggered. (examples: Can you stay at a hotel versus at your parents’ place? Rent a car if you need to simply need to get away when you’re feeling triggered? Plan some dates with a loving friend who you know will be in town?)

List out five examples of how you can set boundaries with your family members — verbally, physically, and emotionally. (examples: I won’t participate in any family conversations about politics. I will politely tell my Aunt to stop asking me when I plan on having children and will change the conversation to my cousin’s new job instead. I will not go for a car ride alone with my brother anymore.)

List out a few examples of any things you may need to realistically talk about, address, or process with family members in order to create better contact over the holidays. (examples: Is there an apology you need to make? An apology you need to ask for? What are five things you may want to say or hear to help heal a fractured relationship? Hint: check out my blog posts on assertive communication and tips to improve your communication to support any dialogues you may wish to have.)

Step Three: Recognize and Release Attachment to What You Probably Cannot Change.

Despite all our hard-earned skillful communication tools and our well-won embodied relational know-how, sometimes we simply cannot effectively communicate with our families and/or get our needs and wants met by them. And so I think it’s critical to build a step of releasing attachment to what we cannot change into the Holiday Coping Kit. Awareness about what simply isn’t likely to change may help set more realistic expectations for us as we head into holidays with family.

• List out five things that you imagine you simply never will be able to change/adjust/set boundaries around/alter in your family dynamics over the holidays.
• List out five examples of things you are willing to release attachment to over this holiday season. (examples: maybe a certain relative will most likely never own her part in a conflict and apologize for the hurtful impact she had – she may not have the relational skills to do this. Can you release attachment to this?)

Step Four: Fill Your Holiday Coping Kit With Self-Soothing Interventions.

Now that we’ve brought our awareness to how we might get triggered, how we respond when triggered, become curious about what’s actionable and changeable, and recognized and released attachment to what’s likely not going to change, we’re now going to fill your coping kit with self-soothing interventions — a personalized, tailored-for-time-with-family-over-the-holidays list of creative ways you can take good care of yourself if and when you get triggered.

The Safe Harbor List:

List out five people you can call/text/Skype/message who can hold space for you/help you process/feel sane again. (examples: Friends, mentors, your therapist, etc. — Bonus points if you list out and program their numbers into your cell phone before you head out for the holidays!)

The Things That Ground You List:

List out five things that ground you when you’re feeling off-balance. (examples: Physical practices like weight lifting, spending time looking at Facebook photos of you and your friends back home, eating something hearty like potatoes or squash.)

The Things That Comfort You List:

List out five things that bring you tons of comfort when you’re feeling stressed. (examples: your favorite fleece sweatshirt? A cherished copy of your favorite guilty pleasure book? A hot shower with a fancy new bar of soap?)

The Places and Activities That Help You Feel Good:

List out five examples of places you can go to or miscellaneous activities you can do (solo or together) while with family over the holidays. (examples: A daily walk to the coffee shop in your mom’s small town. A quick car ride to a nearby park where you feel a sense of calm watching dogs play. Leading your nieces and nephews in the construction of a gingerbread house.)

A List of Mantras and Wisdom-Bits You Can Say To Yourself:

List out five mantras or empowering beliefs you can say to yourself on repeat to help you center.

Step Five: Putting This All Together.

If you’ve been writing down your answers to these inquiries, you should now have a pretty robust list of insights and awareness into how you may be triggered when spending time with family over the holidays, and a list of actionable steps you can take, either to adjust the family dynamics you’ll be walking into or to take very tender and good care of your precious self if you feel thrown off balance over the next six weeks.

All of this – each and everything you listed – can be part of your proverbial Holiday Coping Kit to ensure that you take really good care of yourself over the holidays — or during any challenging time when the events of our personal lives or the events of our global lives feel like too much.

Finally, I want you to remember that holidays can be very hard for many of us. So I invite you to be very gentle and tender with yourselves and to seek support when you need it over these next few weeks.

Wrapping up.

Now I’d love to hear from you:

Leave a message in the blog comments below to share even more creative and supportive self-care ideas.

Here’s to healing relational trauma and creating thriving lives on solid foundations.

Warmly,

Annie

Frequently Asked Questions

You deserve a life that feels as good as it looks. Let’s work on that together.

References

• Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association.
• Schore, A. N. (2001). The effects of early relational trauma on right brain development, affect regulation, and infant mental health. Infant Mental Health Journal.
• Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology.
• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press.
• Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
• Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual. Guilford Press.
• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books.

Family Systems and the Holiday Dynamic: Why Old Roles Die Hard

There’s a clinical concept that explains something many driven women experience viscerally during the holidays but struggle to name: family homeostasis. It describes the system’s tendency to maintain its established patterns — to pull each member back into their assigned role, regardless of how much they’ve grown, changed, or healed outside the family context.

Monique is a 40-year-old chief people officer at a technology company. In her professional life, she sets clear expectations, holds boundaries with grace, and has built a team culture she’s genuinely proud of. But every December, she flies home to her family in the midwest and within six hours, she’s managing her mother’s anxiety, absorbing her father’s passive criticism, and smoothing over tension between her siblings — all while running the emotional labor of the gathering. She told me: “I know exactly what’s happening. I can name every dynamic in clinical terms. And I still can’t stop doing it.”

What Monique is experiencing is the pull of family homeostasis, and it’s important to understand that recognizing a pattern isn’t the same as having the nervous system resources to interrupt it. The intellectual understanding comes first. The somatic capacity to stay regulated while the system pulls at you develops more slowly, through consistent work. Trauma-informed therapy builds exactly that capacity — not the intellectual knowledge of what’s happening, but the embodied ability to remain yourself while the system applies pressure to make you someone else.

What helps in the moment — beyond the coping kit steps above — is what I call a pre-entry anchor: a clear articulation, held in your body as much as your mind, of who you are as an adult. Not a performance of that identity. Not a set of rules to follow. An actual felt sense of your own selfhood that you can return to when the family system starts doing its work. This might be a moment of grounding before you walk in the door, a physical object that reminds you of your adult life, a text exchange with a friend who knows you. The form matters less than the function: keeping a thread of connection to the self you’ve built, when the system tries to collapse you back into the self you were.

Both/And: You Can Honor Your Family and Still Name What Happened

One of the hardest things about healing from a difficult childhood is the pressure — internal and external — to pick a side. Either your parents did their best or they failed you. Either your childhood was “that bad” or you’re being dramatic. In my practice, the women who make the most progress are the ones who stop trying to resolve this tension and learn to hold it instead. (PMID: 9384857)

Mei is a startup CEO who grew up in a home that looked enviable from the outside — good schools, family vacations, a mother who volunteered at every event. It took Mei years to name what was missing: emotional attunement. Her achievements were celebrated; her feelings were dismissed. “You have nothing to be upset about” was the family refrain. By the time she reached my office, she’d internalized that message so deeply that she felt guilty for being in therapy at all.

Both/And means Mei can love her parents and still be honest about the ways their limitations shaped her. She can acknowledge that they did their best with what they had and simultaneously acknowledge that their best wasn’t enough in some critical ways. These aren’t contradictions. They’re the full truth of most family stories, and particularly the stories of driven women who learned early that performance was the price of belonging.

The Systemic Lens: Why Generational Trauma Is a Systemic Issue, Not Just a Personal One

The message that love must be earned — through performance, compliance, achievement, or self-erasure — doesn’t originate in individual families. It’s transmitted through culture at every level. Schools reward compliance. Workplaces reward output. Social media rewards the curated life. By the time a driven woman arrives in therapy, she’s been marinating in conditional acceptance for decades, and her family of origin was simply the first classroom.

This matters because without the systemic lens, childhood healing can become another form of self-blame. If the problem is just “my family,” then the solution is just “my therapy” — and the structural forces that perpetuated the pattern remain invisible and intact. When a driven woman understands that her parents were themselves products of systems that didn’t teach emotional intelligence, didn’t provide mental health support, and actively punished vulnerability, she can begin to locate the injury more accurately.

In my work with clients, I’ve found that the systemic lens doesn’t diminish personal responsibility — it contextualizes it. Your parents are accountable for their behavior. And your parents were also shaped by forces larger than themselves. Both things are true. Understanding the systemic layer doesn’t excuse harm. It helps you stop carrying the shame of harm you didn’t cause.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

Medical Disclaimer